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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Second-Order Logic: The Controversy - Less Wrong
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Would you like to go through all of them just to be sure? How long do you think that will take you?
Trying to actually compute a sufficiently large busy beaver number, you'll run into the problem that there won't be enough material in the observable universe to construct the corresponding Turing machines and/or that there won't be enough usable energy to power them for the required lengths of time and/or that the heat death of the universe will occur before the required lengths of time. If there's no physical way to go through the relevant computations, there's no physical sense in which the relevant computations output a result.
It may not be possible to check all of them, but it certainly is possible to check one of them...any one of them. And whichever one you choose to check, you'll find that it exists. So if you claim that some of the possible configurations don't exist, you're claiming they'd have to be among the ones you don't choose to check. But wait, this implies that your choice of which one(s) to check somehow affects which ones exist. It sure would be spooky if that somehow turns out to be the case, which I doubt.
Exactly. And I could make my choice of which pr0n library to check--or which 1.5TB turing machine to run--dependent on 10^13 quantum coinflips; which, while it would take a while, seems physically realizable.